John McWhorter says we should quit arguing about how to teach reading and just accept that we already know perfectly well how to do it:
In a word, phonics....Phonics works better for more children. Project Follow Through, a huge investigation in the late 1960s led by education scholar Siegfried Englemann, taught 75,000 children via the phonics-based Direct Instruction method from kindergarten through third grade at 10 sites nationwide. The results were polio-vaccine-level dramatic. At all 10 sites, 4-year-olds were reading like 8-year-olds, for example.
....However, there is a persistent disconnect between the world of reading science and the world of people teaching children to read. Only 15 percent of programs training elementary-school teachers include actual instruction on how to teach children to read. There remain people who favor the whole word method, or a combination of whole word and phonics, or even no particular “method” at all.
There's a wealth of research that confirms this, but unfortunately reading instruction has become part of the culture wars, with conservatives taking the side of phonics while university education departments tend to favor other methods.
This is unfortunate. Phonics works, and to the extent that you can invent add-ons that are potentially a little bit better it's really not worth the effort. DI-based phonics instruction is so good that we'd be a lot better off simply making it universal since it works well with both poor and affluent children. In addition:
There is a racial angle to this....We have known how to teach Black children, including poor ones, how to read since the Johnson administration: the Direct Instruction method of phonics. In this case, Black children don’t need special materials; districts need incur no extra expenses in purchasing such things. I consider getting Direct Instruction to every Black child in the country a key plank of three in turning the corner on race in America (the other two are ending the War on Drugs and sharply increasing funding and cultural support to vocational education).
Liberals should get on this train. Stop resisting just because conservatives have been pushing this for decades. In this case, they're right.
4 year olds reading at an 8 year old level? For starters: An experiment that would achieve that should be closed down by the Supreme Court as cruel and unusual punishment: It would require intensive training starting on the 3rd birthday at the latest....
More generally: If something is too good to be true it is not true. An article that makes claims like this one can safely be disregarded, even by people ignorant of the details of reading instruction.
By the time I entered 1rst grade I was reading at high school level. It involved a bad mistake my mother made with several crates of Golden Books in Trinidad. I wasn't supposed to find the whole stash within a day of them arriving. She and my father had to teach me to read in self defense. Then I discovered all my father's science fiction and detective novels... My first grade teacher was pretty shook up, but eventually got used to me sitting and reading science fiction and both classic and noir detective novels (polished off the first grade reader within an hour at home).
I struggled with writing, but I had read half the library in my little rural school by the end of second grade.
My first grade teacher was so flummoxed at having a student that managed to score 100% on all the achievement tests (the state was trying to see how far we progressed, even in 1980) that she said she kept losing her place while grading.
I don't buy that either. Few 4 year olds can read at all.
And, as they say, "If phonics is so good why do they spell it that way?"
"There's a wealth of research that confirms this, but unfortunately reading instruction has become part of the culture wars, with conservatives taking the side of phonics while university education departments tend to favor other methods."
Agreed. Too many "Hooked on Phonics" ads on Rush Limbaugh's show will do that. The idea that this "ideological" is ridiculous.
This is from Australia, but still:
“Who are these people who oppose phonics?” he says. “Maybe 20 years ago those people existed, but I don’t think there’s any dispute about the importance of it today."
WaPo:
More important, when Camilli et al. (2006) reanalyzed the National Reading Panel (2000) data set and directly compared systematic to unsystematic phonics (excluding studies that had no phonics, such as “whole word” interventions), the advantage for systematic phonics was greatly reduced and no longer statistically significant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why-both-sides-reading-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/
Thanks! The article really gets to the nub of the issue: Rigid adherence to phonics ignores that English spelling has morphological rules that often have only loose connections to phonetics. Kids need to both be able to "sound out" words to see if they already know them and examine placement and spelling to determine their role. This facilitates progression from just reading words to reasoning with words.
Whatever makes sense and works, do it.
Why does it have to make sense if it works? (only half joking here...)
Is Chinese reading taught with "whole words" ? Or with Hanyu pinyin and then whole Putonghua or Mandarin words ?
I have been teaching the last 15 years and the resistance to phonics at the elementary level is astonishing to me. When elementary schools started moving towards whole word instruction my mom happened to get a job in a private school when I entered 1st grade. I was only taught phonics and when I went back to public schools in 3rd grade I was 2 or 3 reading levels above my class. And I went back to public school to and middle/upper income suburb. Phonics helps with reading but it also helps with vocabulary and something called reading fluency. Reading just like many other things should not be political.